Hani: A Life Too Short

By Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp

Chris Hani's assassination in 1993 gave rise to one of South Africa's great imponderables: if he had survived, what impact would he have had on politics and government in South Africa? More pointedly, could this charismatic leader have risen to become president of the country? Hani was a hero of South Africa's liberation, a communist party leader and Umkhonto we Sizwe chief of staff who was both intellectual and fighter, a man who could inspire an army but carried a book of poetry in his backpack. Hani led MK into its earliest battles, and carved a formidable reputation as a thinker, debater and peacemaker. Hani: A Life Too Short tells the story of Hani's life, from his childhood in rural Transkei and education at Fort Hare University to the controversial Memorandum of 1969, the crisis in the ANC camps in Angola in the 1980s and the heady dawn of freedom. Drawing on interviews and the recollections of those who knew him, this vividly written book provides a detailed account of the life of a great South African.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Release date: Jan 18, 2011
• ISBN: 9781868423736

Book preview

For Isabella, Lola and Sinead

and

Nadia, Qaim and Zorina

Hani

A Life Too Short

A Biography

Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp

JONATHAN BALL PUBLISHERS

JOHANNESBURG & CAPE TOWN

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. The Roots of a Man

2. Fort Hare

3. Flight into Exile

4. The USSR

5. Kongwa

6. Wankie

7. The Memorandum

8. Lesotho

9. Kabwe

10. Angola

11. Coming Home

12. The Assassination

13. Anne Duthie

Postscript

Picture section

Appendix I: The ANC’s press release on the assassination of Chris Hani

Appendix II: Speech by Nelson Mandela on being awarded the Chris Hani Award

Appendix III: Statement from the SACP, presented by Chris Hani, 20 December 1991

Appendix IV: Memorandum (1969)

Appendix V: Umkhonto we Sizwe Military Code (abridged)

Preamble

1. Umkhonto we Sizwe – a People’s Army

2. Political and Military Struggle

3. People’s War

4. Our People’s Army

5. Umkhonto insists on a high standard of selfless devotion to the revolution on the part of all its members

6. Revolutionary Discipline and Consciousness

Notes on Sources

Chapter 1: The Roots of a Man

Chapter 2: Fort Hare

Chapter 3: Flight into Exile

Chapter 4: The USSR

Chapter 5: Kongwa

Chapter 6: Wankie

Chapter 7: The Memorandum

Chapter 8: Lesotho

Chapter 9: Kabwe

Chapter 10: Angola

Chapter 11: Coming Home

Chapter 12: The Assassination

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank:

James April

Bonile Bam

Esther Barsel

George Bizos

Jennifer Bruce

Luli Callinicos

Comrade J

Diane de Beer

Antoine de Ras

Ayanda Dlodlo

Anne Duthie

Mark Gevisser

Andile Haneae

Aluta Hani

Cleopatra Hani

Nolusapho Hani

The extended Hani family

Bantu Holomisa

Johannesburg Central Library

Ronnie Kasrils

Alf Kumalo

Steve Lawrence

Joyce Leeson

Rachael Lerutla

Rashid Lombard

Hermanus Loots

The people of Lower Sabalele, Cofimvaba

Ben Magubane

Mac Maharaj

Thami Mali

Buti Manamela

Ike Maphoto

Emmanuel Maphatsoe

Pule Matakoane

Zakes Molotsi

Ruth Mompati

Livingstone Mqotsi

Mavuso Msimang

Linda Mti

Mothobi Mutloatse, who asked us to undertake this project in the first place

Mbulelo Mzamane

Phyllis Naidoo

Sukhthi Naidoo

Gasson Ndlovu

Castro Ngobese

Marwanqana Nondala

Alban Nyimbana

Blade Nzimande

Mahalele Qolombeni

Vino Reddy and the Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre, University of KwaZulu- Natal

Patrick Ricketts

Albie Sachs

Mujahied Safodien

Christa Scholtz

Sechaba Setsubi (otherwise known as Comrade Charles)

Archie Sibeko (Zola Zembe)

Max Sisulu

Sparks

Sipho Tshabalala

University of Fort Hare, ANC archives

University of the Witwatersrand archives

Charles Villa-Vicencio

As well as

Moegsien Williams, editor of The Star, without whose unwavering support and belief the book would never have happened.

Jovial Rantao, deputy editor of The Star and editor of the Sunday Independent

Kevin Ritchie

Cecilia Russell

Our patient family and friends – Ricky is die beste! – and colleagues, who not only kept on asking when the book would be finished, but knew it eventually would

Our editor Alfred LeMaitre

Our designer Kevin Shenton

Jeremy Boraine and Francine Blum of Jonathan Ball Publishers who supported us throughout the publishing process

Our agent Monica Seeber

Introduction

It was late November 2007, and the rivalry between Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma dominated the headlines after months of brazen animosity. The two were about to face off at the ANC’s 52nd national conference, to be held at the University of Limpopo in Polokwane, and neither man could afford to lose. The meeting became the nastiest dust-up in ANC history since the historic conference at Morogoro, Tanzania, in 1969. For the first time in nearly 40 years, the ANC was challenged from within by clashing egos and, to a lesser extent, ideology. Mbeki, not so much an ideologue as a man with a formidable ego, could not escape the fact that his name had been a key factor at both meetings.

But another name was consistently evoked in the run-up to Polokwane, just as it had also been, very prominently, at Morogoro. That name was Chris Hani. And the reason his name kept coming up in 2007 was because the ideals of the assassinated SACP leader and former MK commander so readily transcended the savage fights being managed between Luthuli House and the Union Buildings. Quite simply, Hani believed that liberation should free the poor from hunger and landlessness. He cherished nonracialism. He rejected personal power. Surely these had always constituted the shared vision of the movement?

So, as preparations for the conference in Limpopo heated up, the faithful kept asking: what would Hani have done? He had only once attempted to challenge for high office within the party – the position of deputy president. That had been at the first conference back home in 1991 after FW de Klerk had unbanned the liberation movements a year earlier. But both Hani and Thabo Mbeki, his rival for that post, were persuaded to step back in favour of the revered Robben Islander and confidant of Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu.

At that time, the ANC was determined to present a united front. The same had been true at Morogoro in 1969, when a controversial document drafted by Hani and others had criticised corruption within the leadership. This had created deep distress within the liberation movement, and it was only the intervention of then ANC president OR Tambo that had saved Hani’s political future and restored some order.

The gloves were off by the time Polokwane rolled around. No Hani. No OR. No niceties. But certainly many parallels. Indeed, what would Hani have done, where would he have been, had he not been murdered by Polish right-winger Janusz Walus on 10 April 1993? At Polokwane, an otherwise ordinary town in the thornveld on the Great North Road to Zimbabwe, it was do or die. Would Hani, who has been committed to lore as perhaps South Africa’s only quintessentially romantic guerrilla fighter, be properly honoured as what some within the ANC called ‘a living link’ between the rough times of 1969 and 2007?

Watching events unfold in the run-up to Polokwane, we were struck by how little was known about Hani. Paging through archived interviews with the then avowed communist, the same facts always seemed to come up – his love of the classics, his personal charm and his revolutionary fervour. There was little insight into the fabric and texture of the man who died too soon. So as journalists at The Star we started a journey, aimed at coinciding with the 15th anniversary of his murder, that would give the newspaper’s readers a deeper understanding of his life and ideology.

As we found out more about his life, we discovered that the events we were witnessing firsthand as the ANC shuddered before Polokwane – and afterwards, when Thabo Mbeki resigned and the ANC split when the Congress of the People was launched – were in no way unique. And Hani, always prescient, had noted in 1969 what he called ‘the rot,’ and warned vociferously against it again before he died.

Chapter 1

The Roots of a Man

I have been half in love with easeful death … now more than ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight with no pain.

– John Keats, ‘Ode to a nightingale’

The impepho smoulders, the scent roughly serene as it disperses high above the gathering, inviting the ancestors to the sacred reunion. The fragrance is unmistakable, dancing down into the valley below with the swing of the sand road from the homestead pitched high on the hill. If there’s enough strength in it, it might even reach the graves on the other side of the rise where Mary, a peasant, and Gilbert, a worker, lie together for eternity.

Up on that hill, the scent of the traditional herb, the spirit contact, is pure and intoxicating. It’s at its most intense inside the heavy stone walls of Nolusapho Hani’s kraal. For the duration of the ceremony, the goats that usually occupy the kraal have been moved to the adjoining harvested vegetable garden, and the tilled soil is littered with lambs.

The kraal is a place where only the grandfathers, fathers and sons of the family are permitted. Men take precedence over women here. They’re leading their brother out of one world and into another. It’s the way it has always been done: with the blood of a beast, the pride of a man is distinguished. Soon, only the crimson skin of the slaughtered ox lies sprawled in the centre.

The grandmothers, mothers and daughters, excluded for generations from the gathering of men, nestle outside the walls, bare legs poking out beneath orange skirts, necks festooned with beads, their laughter tight, lovely and low. They embrace the children bounding in and out of the convivial circle, the youngest jumping over rocks like young frogs in the brisk August sunshine.

The Hani family spear – symbolising sorrow and joy, life and death, the pulsing contradictions of blood – has been used a lot of late. The children admire it even as they keep their distance. Two brothers – the eldest, Mbuyiselo Victor, and the youngest, Christopher Nkosana – have died. Their parents, Mary and Gilbert, died within six years of each other, after the murder of their middle son, Martin Tembisile. Mary – who had spent her life working for her family – couldn’t survive an ailment of the heart.

The night before the Washing of the Spades, under an opulent spill of stars, the children of the extended Hani family had raced around, from the verandahs to the secrecy of the dark vegetable garden, joyful at the adventure of a night-time game.

The ceremony is all about blood, the Hani family preparing to pay their last respects and send Victor on his final journey, an act that would take place early the next morning. They had been arriving for days, by bus from as far away as Stellenbosch and by bakkie from as close as Queenstown. By Friday night, there were 60 or 70 people at Nolusapho Hani’s household. Her husband Victor had been dead for 11 months, and the time had come at last for him to go home.

The slaughter was to commence at 6 am, although the men assemble closer to eight, to exchange greetings in the ripening morning breeze before turning their attention to the task at hand. Nolusapho’s herd, usually quiet at this hour, is led out of the kraal with low grunts and bellows, and agitated clunks of the hooves. In Sabalele, a bank balance is visible for all to see, bleating and stamping in front of a homestead. Soon, only one animal remains, the sacrificial ox, marked days before.

Now the men move into the kraal, most with their backs close to the stacked wall. It is time. The one designated to kill the ox steps forward. There is a defiant hush. Carefully, carefully, a quick, deadly thrust to the nape of the neck to draw out the beast’s power. The spear remains inside the flesh as the animal flails wildly, weakening, consternation in its eyes, excitement in the faces of the men. The horns search blindly for a perpetrator. The five-metre radius, hemmed in by the imposing walls of the kraal, quickly becomes a very small space. Quick steps left, then right, a dance in tune with the out-of-step animal.

Slower. Meeker. Its power is waning. The men move back. As the ox grinds its hooves into the floor, clouds of dust billow up from beneath it. Then, with a rhythmical baulking, surely its last, the animal thuds heavily, awkwardly, to the ground. A knife, and the throat is slit.

Expert hands go to work, taking the animal apart. Head, innards, rump, ribs. All quickly disseminated and briefly dunked in a bucket of water. Skewers of thick wire are thrust through blocks of meat, which are randomly tossed onto glowing coals.

The greybeards and ambling boys convene on the low wooden benches along the walls, each with knife in hand. They gather around the fire, some with jeans peeping underneath overalls they will soon outgrow.

The meat emerges sealed in black burn, and tender. Those on the benches eat first, thrusting their hands into the presented bowls. By the time the sun has dropped behind the rim of hills surrounding the homestead, all the meat has been consumed.

‘Today we eat only meat. All day, meat,’ says one young man serving. Those sharing in the peace after the slaughter, the time to celebrate, would have thought a lot about Dushe, the name by which they knew Victor Hani, brother of Sabalele’s greatest son Martin Tembisile, later known as Chris Hani. Now both were gone. Victor had died almost a year before, on 29 September 2007. Their younger brother Christopher Nkosana had died in Cofimvaba hospital in February 2004 after a short illness. Chris Hani had been shot dead, many hours away, on 10 April 1993.

Today the family will guide the older brother home in the company of their ancestors. But they are saddened that there was never such a farewell for Chris in his village of Sabalele. For his family there, his death was an ending without the proper farewells. His remains are not in this soil, though they belong there, they say.

* * *

After Queenstown, the lonely road stretches out ahead. We’ve been listening to Hugh Masekela’s African Breeze, the trumpeter’s warmest tide of love music for his country. As Masekela eases his belly fire of a voice into the live version of ‘Coal Train’, the blur of the Cofimvaba wilderness shifts from the margins of poverty into uncompromising beauty. It is difficult to stay away from this place.

This was not the first time we had made the journey, from Johannesburg via East London, through the defeated little university town of Alice. Skirting the midway trade of Queenstown, and all the way down the great highway to St Marks, Chris Hani’s birthplace rolled away in the misty hinterland of heavenly sighs that the people still call Transkei.

The first time we went there was months before the 15th anniversary of Hani’s assassination. We had set up interviews with those who knew Hani as a child, for a series of stories for The Star. The villagers still refer to him as Martin or Tembisile, never as Chris. By the time he had adopted his nom de guerre, choosing the name of his younger brother, Sabalele was a talisman for the battles that were to come.

We were searching for something else when we went to Sabalele for the first time: an understanding of one of the world’s great revolutionary heroes, of one of the most revered individuals within a proudly collectivist movement. So we had to start in the hills of his childhood, to try to find a man who could have occupied the highest office.

The last time Hani returned to Sabalele was in 1993, just three weeks before his death, and his arrival immersed the villagers in honour. Everyone who hoped they might still mean something to him had gathered in Gilbert and Mary’s three-roomed homestead. The people realised that absence, of an especially momentous 30 years, could have made him forget, but still they waited. Among them were his oldest friends, Marwanqana Nondala and Mahelele Qolombeni, their smiles chased into the pattern of age on their faces, and his primary school principal, Alban Nyimbana.

Hani was without peer. He remembered everyone by name, and the memory of that momentary sensation – that they might indeed have meant something to such an important man – still brings a flash of emotion for the people of his past. Everyone we met who had known Hani reflected on this quality: his compassionate interludes with people, his understanding of how human detail matters.

When the villagers had last seen Hani, in 1962, he was 20 years old, a Fort Hare graduate in classical and legal studies and a socialist intrigued by the possibilities of overthrowing pain and injustice. He was tall, thick-set and handsome, with a ready joke and a renowned facility for jovial banter. At that time, he was involved with the bright Judy Thunyiswa, a schoolgirl in Alice when they met. He was on his way to do his articles at the law firm of Schaeffer and Schaeffer in Cape Town, where his father Gilbert lived.

The next thing the people of Sabalele heard, Hani had vanished, like so many others. And he was gone for the next three decades. So was his father, banished to Lesotho. Mary Hani – who remained illiterate – was left to a peculiar suffering, sporadically harassed by the police and invested with a longing that would not recede.

When Hani, by then a father of four, returned home in 1993, he would have opened the back door of his father’s house and walked straight into the dining room. Perhaps he would have gone to the window with its view of the plot marked out where he had been born in 1942. His embrace of his old life, shown by his warmth on his return, allowed the villagers to admire him more intimately.

The way they lined up established something of an ad hoc guard of honour for the former Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) chief of staff and general secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP). At that moment, it seemed as if it was the beginning again, the birth of a new relationship between the village and the man. His consciousness had been raised there. He had always talked about it, thought about it, been driven by it.

In an interview, he spoke warmly of his village, but inherent in every line was his eternal reason for doing what he did: the poverty hurt. He wanted it to be different. He wanted poor people to experience the dignity and honour they deserved. He wanted the kind of freedom that would reach, and gain meaning, into the next generation and the next. But for now, it hurt.

‘Many of the people I knew as a youth were there to welcome me,’ Hani told academic and historian Charles Villa-Vicencio in an interview for the 1991 book The Spirit of Hope:

The older folk were proud to receive a child home … I also met some of my school friends and realised how little had changed.

Women were still walking five kilometres to fetch water, carrying it on their heads back to their meagre homes. People were still walking 15 kilometres to the nearest store to buy soap or sugar. A few people had radio, no-one had television and the problems of illiteracy were as sharp as they were when I was a child. I was revisiting my life of 40 years earlier. It was a strange and fearful experience.

I visited the church, the priest, talked with the nuns and remembered how I used to enjoy getting up early on Sunday mornings to perform my duties as an altar boy. They listened to my stories from the past and attended the ceremony later that day to welcome me home. There was no concern that I was a communist, and I found myself as much at home among the religious community of Cofimvaba as I had before I left that place in the early fifties.

Hani was very busy after he returned home. Everybody wanted to speak to him, especially Nelson Mandela. The ANC’s Jessie Duarte said in a Frontline interview for American television:

Madiba really loved Chris Hani. Chris was one of the people who saw him at least once a week. He was able to talk to Madiba about a great number of things. They had a vision about youth cadet colleges.

Chris’s politics fascinated Madiba. Chris, as a man, fascinated him, and he often described Chris as one of the valuable jewels the ANC had in its fold.

On the morning that Chris was killed, he [Madiba] was at his house in the Transkei, and I phoned him. When I spoke to him, he was shocked. He was very worried, and decided that he would go to see Chris’s family immediately. That was his reaction. That he would drive from where he was to see Chris’s family.

It was who he was. His first concern was to make sure that the immediate family was okay. He was very saddened by it. It was a loss that he knew could not be replaced.

In 1993, the people of Sabalele would have been content knowing there would be a next time, and a time after that, to see Hani again, to talk through what mattered. Their only desire was that he would be among them again. When he died, the necessity to complete his journey was immense. There had been no Washing of the Spades for Hani. Nothing could happen without the consent of his widow, Limpho Hani, and she decided to lay him to rest in South Park Cemetery, Boksburg, a short drive from where they lived and where he died.

* * *

On our third visit to Sabalele, we met Cleopatra Thunyiswa Hani. At first, Hani’s eldest daughter, now 43, was reluctant to untangle the story of her parents, or herself. We had had long conversations on the phone – she had moved from the village to King William’s Town – and she spoke a lot about the difficult divides in her life.

Cleo Hani is afraid of what Phakamisa, the township where she now lives, represents, and what damage it could do to her son, Aluta. At the time of the 15-year anniversary, he was also nearly 15, born a mere three months after his grandfather’s assassination. The boy has an enigmatic relationship with the man he does not know. Had Hani lived, perhaps Aluta would not have had to exist in such poverty.

People sometimes speak of a son born to Hani, but Cleo dismisses this. ‘People play as if they knew Tembisile. But they don’t know Tembisile. He was a very loving man. He would have told us if he had a son.’

This is one of the many mysteries. When Hani died, a few used the ever-changing narrative of his last years to claim they were his closest confidants. Those who were indeed close to him as comrades, even his bodyguards or drivers, have raged about those who have made claims upon friendship, which Hani could neither deny nor affirm, to hoist themselves up. When did these friendships bloom? Everybody shrugs. A friendship with Hani, say those who believe they know, was not only based on military convictions or on what Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore called ‘giving and taking, meeting and uniting’. It was about the inside of a man’s heart.

There are letters written by Hani – for example, to Durban lawyer Phyllis Naidoo – that offer tenderness, an insight into his private life which reflects something more than acquaintance. He trusted Naidoo enough to ask her to write his biography, but he died before they were able to spend the hours she needed to talk his life through with him.

The late Steve Tshwete was certainly a close friend. His official MK bodyguards in exile say Hani and Pallo Jordan would joke and laugh together: they, too, had a rapport and a strong bond. In a speech at the launch of the Chris Hani Institute at the Parktonian Hotel in April 2003, Jordan spoke memorably about a comrade who was caught in social, political and religious cross-currents:

I remember once teasing him – because we regularly ribbed each other – ‘The line of work that really would have suited you is that of a village priest.’ To which he responded, in all seriousness – ‘Laddie, it’s in this job that I feel I am truly doing the Lord’s work!’

Some might say that was blasphemous, but if a God exists, I think he/she knows how to count them! If indeed Comrade Chris was performing God’s work, it was because he had read and taken to heart the eleventh of Karl Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach: ‘Philosophers have only described the world in different ways; the point however is to change it.’

Every year, around the anniversary of Chris Hani’s murder, promises are made by government and those who claim to be comrades. Cleo Hani couldn’t care less about that, and she holds no grudges. The Hanis of Sabalele – and, indeed, the whole community – have had to get on with it by themselves.

Gradually, the conversation ebbed and flowed between the hopes Cleo has for herself and her son, and her reminiscences of a father she seldom saw and who she knew even less. Beauty is evident in her face; she’s a lot like her father. But she has a great responsibility to Chris Hani’s grandson, and it is not easy being the mother of a teenager.

On the day of the Washing of the Spades, she rested her hand gently on the boy’s shoulder, an unconscious token of love. His eyes stared abstractly, but Aluta was meditating on what was being said. Her words were stern, yet not loud enough for anyone to hear. He had to be reprimanded for forgetting to bring the goats and cattle home from the hills. In any case, everybody knew what he had done.

In a place like Sabalele, people who really know what happened hardly say a word. Those who have no idea of the truth are the ones who can’t stop talking. So this was Aluta’s saving grace; this was his shield.

On the day of the Washing of the Spades, he had been allowed into the Hani kraal, where the rest of the older boys and men had gathered to pay their respects to Dushe. Aluta Martin Tembisile Thunyiswa Hani was now a young adult. So there was some excitement for him about this occasion. The novelty of filial acceptance and anticipation. The blood of a beast had been spilt. There was laughter among the teenage boys gathered in one corner. Aluta, smaller than most of them, timidly joined in. The sleeves of his grey overall were folded at the wrist, the hems of the trousers bunched over his shoes.

He knew that the moment his mother arrived, there would be words about his indiscretion over forgetting to return the livestock to the kraal. His great-aunt, Nolusapho Hani – his guardian while his mother was in King William’s Town – had already punished him. She had taken away his treasured bicycle, given to him by his mother on a trip home from Phakamisa. In Sabalele, beatings and rebukes are used to discipline children. But it goes further. Here, a child is made to understand that possessions are a luxury. Especially a bicycle. Here, they take away the things you prize most.

* * *

Far away, in South Park cemetery, on 10 April 2008, two Hanis sat together, wedged between COSATU general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi and the SACP’s Blade Nzimande – the representatives of the workers and oppressed. They kept company with Tokyo Sexwale, the former Robben Island prisoner turned tycoon, who had become the face of black business since resigning as Gauteng Premier.

Hani’s memorial, discreet at first, had to be redone after it was vandalised in 1995. Today, it is a huge red marble stone with the flags of the ANC and SACP adorning either side. Buried alongside him is respected comrade Thomas Nkobi, former treasurer-general of the ANC.

On the day of the 15-year anniversary, a contingent of supporters arrived at the cemetery toyi-toyiing and chanting liberation songs. They were a mere whisper of the tens of thousands who had gathered at South Park cemetery in unmitigated anger and grief for Hani’s burial in 1993.

The trio of Vavi, Nzimande and Sexwale spent the afternoon trading verbal exchanges from the podium, to the amusement of the buoyant crowd. The two Hanis – Limpho, elegant in a black suit and oversized sunglasses, and her doting daughter, Lindiwe – smiled dutifully.

Limpho Hani had not been back to Sabalele for 15 years although her daughters had, taken there by Limpho’s father, Ntathi Sekamane. The Hanis in that small village in the Transkei believed she would come. She just hadn’t done it yet, and this perplexed us. No one would say what they really believed was the reason for her absence. No one would go on record, and Limpho Hani herself declined to be interviewed.

* * *

Back in Sabalele when we were doing our research, we had wanted to experience Hani’s environment so we could get an understanding of where he grew up and how this affected his early life. We wondered whether this had not also been a preoccupation of his widow. It had, for instance, taken him two hours to get to school every day and to church on Sundays, and another two hours back. So we took the walk he took, through a wintry landscape that he must have known well. While we walked, we encountered an old man, who was ready for us well before we reached him.

He waited for us on his morning stroll to the hamlet of Zigudu, a few minutes’ walk ahead, his silence interrupted by our conversation. Zigudu houses the mission station where Hani had first discovered the nature of the soul, displaying wisdom unusual for a child.

Voices and laughter travel here. You can hear echoes as gentle as the brush of a skirt on the ground, or as strong as the rumble of drums and the wail of hymns from a funeral service over the next hill and the hill after that.

The old man saw us coming – unmistakably out of place – from some distance. So when he began the conversation he wanted to have, but in Xhosa, his head was tilted back, the warm surprise shyly rehearsed for strangers.

We didn’t understand his opening remarks, even though his curiosity was so obvious. His white hair and beard, threadbare grey jacket, navy trousers and herder’s stick were nondescript, so for a moment the three of us stood there, waiting. The road to Zigudu is a route of necessary patience, every turn a deceit when you think you’ve almost reached your destination. The road’s only obligation is to the river that twists alongside it. In the distance are the lime-green and pink huts that stand out like drawing-pins on the hills. Black and white plovers pick at the wealth of the land, the tapping of their beaks applause for the harvest, before they bounce off the waves of grass.

‘I don’t speak English,’ the old man said, and then tried. ‘Where … you going? Why you don’t use a car? Why are you walking?’ We explained our need to walk, to slow things down and understand the walk that Hani took every day of his childhood. We were looking for answers to our questions about Hani, and we hoped that we might understand more, doing things this way.

‘You like to walk?’ the old man exclaimed, excited, before jumping full-tilt into a caricature of a man running, his arms and legs pumping in an exaggerated fashion as he stayed rooted to the spot. His soft smile at our laughter indicated an appreciation for his joke. We were strangers no more after that meeting on the road to Zigudu.

For Hani, the road would have simply been the road, the time it would take to get from here to there, and nothing more. There would surely have been fewer and fewer pauses to take in the majesty, no lingering to marvel. But we could imagine how thoughtful Hani might have been on those walks.

Hani’s two daughters with his wife Limpho had more in their beauty of their mother. Nomakhwezi died before her 21st birthday, in a loss which magnified her mother’s apparently well-kept pain. A miracle baby born after her mother fell pregnant again following an earlier, brutal miscarriage in detention, Nomakhwezi was just 15 when she heard the four fatal shots that ripped into her father on a weekend he had set aside for them to be together. When their father was killed, her younger sister Lindiwe was away with her mother, and her older sister Neo was in Cape Town.

Cleo, the oldest sister, has her father’s face – soft, handsome, with a distinctive swell to the jawline. You don’t expect the resemblance to be so immediate, but it’s clearly an identity written into her bones. Her son Aluta is cast completely in his mother’s image. Cleo was pregnant when she received the news that her father’s life had been taken. All that remains for her now is their likeness.

Hani’s mother once revealed why Hani’s slightly raised top lip was so distinctive. He was a thumb-sucker until he was almost 10, but only in the dignity of privacy. His mother said she remembered him in his most solitary childhood moments, always with his thumb in his mouth, often reading, often thinking.

Cleo insists on her right to be as like her father as would ever have been possible. She spontaneously reveals how she loves books, how contented she is across a chessboard, or enjoying time with no more than the radio for company. But was she simply believing the hype?

Hani was the boy of books in Sabalele. His teachers and principals at Zigudu and Sabalele Primary were roused by his complexity and his acumen. Some, like his old primary-school headmaster, Alban Nyimbana, said they have yet to meet another child quite like Chris – and he was a child in 1956. The key to this insight, this pulsing energy so remarkable for his time and circumstances, was revealed later.

His aunt, his father’s sister, who stayed in Zondi, Soweto, was the first person to become a teacher in his family, and she apparently taught Hani to read, write and count before he entered Sub A. ‘She was a source of tremendous influence to all of us,’ Hani recalled in an interview with historian and OR Tambo biographer Luli Callinicos:

This girl, coming from that sort of area, studying to become a teacher. She taught me a few necessary rhymes and began to open up a new world even before I got to school. A world of knowing how to write the alphabet, how to count, in other words, not only literacy but numeracy.

Because of that background, when I went to school I was in a better position than most boys in the village, and I remember how the principal got encouraged, how I would read a story and actually memorise that story and without looking at the book, I would recite it word for word.

Hani’s old friend, Mahelele Qolombeni, smiles as he remembers ‘a very sweet person’. He’s relieved to be able to talk about long ago:

Normally when we came back from school, we had to look